“... seriously and were instead formulating increasingly aggressive plans. On 19 October the military service chiefs confronted Kennedy with demands for an immediate attack on Cuba by land, sea and air.The most hawkish among them, the air force chief of staff, Curtis LeMay, who had made his name incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians during the ...”

“... kneecapped and executed those they suspected of being informers for the British state. Captain Robert Nairac, a member of the army’s undercover 14 Intelligence Company, apparently frustrated with the lack of information he was getting from the RUC, decided to go to a pub in South Armagh one Saturday night in 1977, a pistol hidden in his clothes, in an ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... medicine Cummings proposed to turbocharge innovation – including drastic reform of the civil service, and massive R&D spending in place of simply funnelling money up north – was far too much for Johnson, who was terrified it might make him unpopular. That left a vacuum where serious policy might be. Soon enough the empty space was filled by ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... educated in the US but the former heads of the Saudi National Guard and the General Intelligence Service, as well as members of the Allegiance Council and a former defence minister, also attended Sandhurst. A skeleton British military presence remained behind in the Gulf. In 2016, Theresa May pledged to increase Britain’s military commitments ...”

“... dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise. While still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less ...”

“... They represented, as Miller puts it, ‘a move away from an educational mission to a service orientation’. The move worked. By 1982, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton accounted for 24 per cent of all book sales in America. Crown, which came on the scene in 1977, was different: it set its horizons beyond the mall parking lot. It would do to main-street ...”

“... connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to ...”

“... above the line began an exclusive region of suites of as many as twelve rooms with private butler service.’ The upper floors of tall buildings, once given over to staff dormitories, had become what Bernard calls an ‘enclave of the elite’. The Waldorf-Astoria’s express elevators, travelling direct to the 29th floor, were as much barrier as ...”

“... an average MacBook with five or six years of useful life; roughly £1000 for two years of iPhone service. One measure of Jobs’s achievement is the money Apple earns from millions of individual consumers, revenue that has continued to increase while the global economy stagnates. Isaacson lists some of the ways in which our lives are shaped by minor design ...”

“... worried: one of Shpayer-Makov’s most interesting discoveries is that the Victorian plainclothes service attracted very few middle-class recruits. Almost all police detectives were working-class men who’d graduated from the uniformed branch. And since they weren’t gentlemen, they couldn’t be trusted to uphold gentlemanly values. The freelance ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman general, Crassus, carefully choreographing this ...”

“... the Greek emperor’s Varangians (by this time largely exiled Englishmen) fought the Normans under Robert Guiscard, with much the same result: early Varangian success brought to a stand by cavalry charges, followed by withering archery; no survivors. The English had weapons, but the Normans had a weapons system. Wood’s view, in short, is that the result at ...”